Piloting an Educational Response to Violence in Uganda: Prospects for a New Curriculum

Abstract

This pilot study assessed Mato-Oput5 (hereafter the curriculum), a new peace education curriculum, for indications of beneficial efficacy, specifically the capacity to reduce negative attitudes towards conflict and violence, and injury and violence rates. A cluster randomised control design was used. Three of the six purposively selected schools were exposed to the curriculum. Mato-Oput5 is a value-based, formalised curriculum taught by specifically trained teachers. Its learning areas include conflict, conscience, violence, non-violence, impulse control, anger management, kindness, forgiveness, empathy and reconciliation. The results showed the baseline and post-intervention bio-demographic characteristics of the treatment arms to be comparable, thus suggesting baseline group equivalence and randomisation success. The follow-up loss was 9%. The mean pre- and post-intervention intentional incident rates of the intervention and control groups were 270/1000 and 370/1000, and 190/1000 and 350/1000, respectively: these differences were not significant. The intervention had no effect on post-intervention intentional incident rates. There were indications of beneficial efficacy in the curriculum, especially its ability to cause attitude shifts in support of non-violence. Statistically significant behavioural effects were not detected although a downward rate trend was seen in the intervention group.